Biography of Dr. Satyandra K. Gupta

Dr. Satyandra K. Gupta is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research at the University of Maryland. He is also the director of the Maryland Robotics Center. Prior to joining the University of Maryland, he was a Research Scientist in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Gupta received a Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Roorkee (currently known as the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee) in 1988. He received a Gold Medal for securing the first rank in his B.E. class (1988) and a Gold Medal for the best Engineering Design Project (1988). He received a Master of Technology (M. Tech.) in Production Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1989. He received a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1994. During his Ph.D. study, he was awarded a Graduate School Fellowship and an Institute for Systems Research Graduate Fellowship. For his highly inter-disciplinary Ph.D. research, he received Institute for Systems Research’s George Harhalakis Outstanding Systems Engineering Graduate Student Award (1994).

Dr. Gupta's research interest is in the area of automation. He is specifically interested in automation problems arising in Computer Aided Design, Manufacturing Automation, and Robotics. His prior work mainly focused in the geometric reasoning area. Specifically, he worked on accessibility analysis, feature recognition, manufacturability analysis, mold design, path planning, process planning, setup planning, shape similarity assessment, shape measurement, and tool selection problems. He has experience with the following manufacturing domains: mechanical assembly, computer numerical control machining, micro fabrication, injection molding, multi-material molding, sheet metal bending, solid freeform fabrication, and waterjet cutting.

Dr. Gupta's current research is focused on simulation-based computational synthesis and planning. In both of these problems, a complex structure is constructed from the given set of building blocks and evaluated using simulations. State space search is used to construct and optimize solutions. The search space includes both continuous and discrete variables and tends to be extremely large. His research is addressing the following issues: (1) what representations to use to efficiently perform search; (2) how to use inductive and deductive reasoning to prune unpromising search space and guide the search process; and (3) how to speed up simulations to enable exploration of large search spaces. Currently, his group is working on robot mechanism, gait, and behavior synthesis problems. His group is also working on automated manufacturing planning, motion planning, trajectory planning, and task planning problems.

Dr. Gupta has authored or co-authored more than two hundred forty articles in journals, conference proceedings, and book chapters. He has also delivered more than seventy invited tutorials, seminars, and keynote lectures at conferences, workshops, government labs, and universities. He holds a US Patent titled Apparatus and Method for Multi-Purpose Setup Planning for Sheet Metal Bending Operations.

Dr. Gupta is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), a senior member of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME), and a senior member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He has served as the Chair of the Design for Manufacturing Technical Committee in the Design Division of ASME. He has organized several conference sessions in the area of computer-aided design, manufacturing automation, and robotics. He has served as Exhibit Chair in 2000 ASME Design Engineering Technical Conferences, Program Chair in 2002 ASME Design for Manufacturing Conference, and Conference Chair in 2003 ASME Design for Manufacturing Conference. He has served as a member on the Editorial Advisory Board for Assembly Automation and Computer Aided Design and Applications journals. He has also served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, ASME Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering, and SME Journal of Manufacturing Processes. He has also served on the Program Committees for Geometric Modeling and Processing Conference, Computer Aided Design Conference, Product Lifecycle Management Conference, CAD and Graphics Conference, IEEE International Symposium on Assembly and Manufacturing, IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, and ACM Solid and Physical Modeling Conference.

Dr. Gupta has received several honors and awards for his research contributions. Representative examples include: a Best Paper Award at the 1994 ASME International Conference on Computers in Engineering, the Best Paper Award at the 1999 ASME Design for Manufacturing Conference, a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research in 2000, a Robert W. Galvin Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers in 2001, a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2001, the Outstanding Systems Engineering Faculty Award from the Institute for Systems Research in 2001, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2001, a Highly Commended Paper Award from Literati Club in 2002,  the Best Paper Award at the 2006 ASME Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, Invention of the Year Award in Physical Science category at the University of Maryland in 2007, the Compliant Mechanism Applications Award at the 2010 ASME Mechanism and Robotics Conference, and Kos Ishii-Toshiba Award from ASME Design for Manufacturing and the Life Cycle Committee in 2011.


Last updated on November 24, 2011